PCPowerGuide.com » Windows Defrag

Windows Tips – Fix My Slow PC!

admin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:15:25 +0000

Isn’t it annoying to be surfing the web and all of a sudden, your computer drags to a crawl and you sit impatiently waiting for a page to load or a download to start? There are several common causes of the slowing down effect on your PC. I will discuss the following three things you can do to speed things up a little bit:

First, download a recommended registry cleaner
Clean and defrag the hard drive
Optimize Memory
Eliminate unnecessary programs from Loading into memory

Clean and Defrag the Hard Drive

A computer’s hard drive is the primary area on your computer used to store the operating system, applications and all the files you create. The hard drive is divided up into areas called sectors. Each sector can hold a certain amount of data. Each sector is further broken up into address spaces. Each address is unique so the operating system can find the data stored on the hard drive. Windows uses a master file table to store the address locations of every file on the hard drive.

Please notice that I said locations. Most files need more than one address location to store the whole thing. Windows will write each piece of the file in locations next to each other (called contiguous space) if possible. If that is not possible, the operating system finds an empty location and writes the data there. As a result, over time, as you edit different files the pieces of a file can be located all over the hard drive.

For example, this disjoint storage is like you putting your shoes in the garage, your pants in the kitchen, your socks in the bedroom, you shirt in the bathroom and you coat in the attic. Obviously if you did that, if would take a lot longer to get dressed in the morning. The same thing happens with files. When they are spread all over the place, it takes longer for windows to find the individual pieces and load them into memory.

This is why you need to both clean up and defrag your hard drive. The clean up process deletes temporary files, file fragments (pieces left over after being deleted), orphans (data whose owner can’t be determined) and data marked for deletion.

Defragging your hard drive is the process of moving all of the pieces of a file into contiguous space so it can be retrieved faster. The operating system will move data around until it gets all the correct pieces together. To defrag:

Turn the screen save off by right clicking anywhere on the desktop
Select Properties then click on the Screen Saver tab and select None.
Next, select My Computer then right click on the hard drive Select Properties then click on Tools.
Select Check Now as shown below to let windows check the hard drive for errors and fix them if necessary. This could take a while so you might want go do something else.

When that is finished, select Defragment Now.

This can take a really long time depending on the size of the hard disk. You might as well go do something else because you CANNOT use the computer while it is defragging.

WARNING: DO NOT TURN THE MACHINE OFF UNTIL DEFRAGGING IS COMPLETE OR IT MAY DAMAGE THE HARD DRIVE

Optimize Memory

There is an old saying in the computer field. “You can never have too much memory.” When I say memory I am talking about random access memory or RAM. RAM is the temporary storage area the operating system uses to store data that is being used currently and to load itself in so all of the commands are immediately available for use.

Otherwise, you would have to wait for the data to be retrieved from the hard drive and then be loaded into memory before you could use it. It would be similar to when you are waiting for a web page to download although not as long a wait.

When the system runs out of physical RAM it uses the hard drive as Virtual Memory and does have to retrieve and load data every time you need it. Virtual memory is also called a swap file. Optimizing reduces the need to swap data into and out of the swap file. You want to put as much memory as you can afford or the machine can hold to significantly speed up your machine.

Eliminate Unnecessary Programs from Loading into Memory

When your computer boots up, it loads all kinds of applications into memory. Most of these programs are called terminate and stay resident programs or TSRs. Closing these programs will free up memory and speed up your computer. In fact, it is even better if you don’t load the ones you really don’t need.

To prevent TSRs from loading go to:

Start -> Run and type msconfig into the dialog box
The System Configuration Utility will open.
Select the Startup Tab as shown below.

Uncheck any that you don’t use very often.
Click OK to exit.
Then reboot the computer.

If you don’t know what a file or what a service does, don’t uncheck it.

Defragging Your Windows Hard Drive

admin — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:24:33 +0000

What is Defragging?

Any time an application or the operating writes data to your hard drive, it writes it to the next available cluster. What that means is that each time you save a file you changed, each piece may be located in different areas of your hard dive. The file system keeps track of where all the pieces are located so finding the file in not a problem. However, fragmentation makes the computer run slower because it takes longer to find and load all of the pieces into memory. Therefore, regularly scheduling defragmentation of your PC should be part of optimizing your hard drive’s performance. The frequency will be determined by the file system in use.

How does Defragmentation Work?

The computer will first analyse your hard drive to see how many files are stored in non-contiguous locations, That means they are not stored next to each other and can be anywhere on the hard drive.

Next the application will calculate how much free disk space it needs to move the files around so that every cluster used by a file is located next to the others.

Defragmenting Your Hard Disk

We are only going to talk about how to defrag XP and defrag vista. There may be minor differences in how the screen shots look in windows 2000, 2003, XP and vista but the steps should be basically the same. You can buy a commercial product that allows you to automatically schedule defragmenting but most people will use the built in utility provided by Microsoft. Later I will tell you how to automate the process using the free utility.

Each hard disk partion (drive C, D, etc.) must be defragged separately. FAT and FAT32 partitions should be degragged wekly. NTFS partitions should be checked monthly to see if they need defragmentation. Anything over 5% should be defragmented.

Go to Start->All Programs -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter to start the application. Or you can open windows explorer and right click on the partition you want to defrag by selecting Properties -> Tools -> Defragment Now. In either case, the window below opens.

Select the hard drive you want to defrag and then click on Analyze. The screen shown below will open. I selected drive C because it has the most read write operations since all of the applications and system files are stored on it.

It may take several minutes but eventually the analysis will stop and the application will tell you if the drive needs defragging. My second drive (G) has 0% fragmentation and has not been defragged for almost a year. However, my system drive needs defragging as shown below.

The picture below is a portion of the report.

30 % file fragmentation is a lot and the computer will definitely run faster when this partition has been defragmented.

Before defragging the drive, close all open windows applications except the defragger.

Select Defragment and then go do something else because, depending on the size of the partition, it can take anywhere from 20 minutes to more than an hour to complete the process.

Defragging the Boot Sector

Windows XP and vista allow boot files to be placed next to each other speeding up startup process. Boot defrag should be enabled by default. However, it is a good idea to check and make certain. Open regedit and go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOTWARE \ Microsoft \ Dfrg \ BootOptimizeFunction registry key. Check that the Data value for Enable is set to Y. If not, right-click on Enable and choose Modify. Then change the value to Y, click OK and close Regedit.

Automating the Defrag Process

You can automate the defrag process by creating a batch file with the proper commands and then using the windows task scheduler to run the file at periodic intervals. Open Notepad and type the following commands

DEFRAG C: DEFRAG D: DEFRAG E: DEFRAG F:

Use the appropriate letters for the hard drive partitions on your computer. Save the file as defrag.bat.

Open the Control Panel. Select Scheduled Tasks and then click on Add New Scheduled Task. A wizard will open to guide you through the process. When asked, browse to the batch file you created, then select an appropriate time period such as monthly and a time of day to run the task. Since defragging can take several hours, I recommend setting it up for the wee hours of the morning.

After you configure the task, the computer should run it at the scheduled times.